This event takes place just before the penultimate 2013 Ecstatic Music Festival concert with Steven Mackey, Rinde Eckert, Big Farm, and JACK Quartet and if you don't have tickets for what promises to be an outstanding show, you can purchase at Merkin. I'm going to the concert after the talk, so hopefully I'll see you at both!

An incredible night of music last Saturday March 16th as myself, Numinous, & Imani Uzuri took the stage of Merkin Concert Hall in NYC for our performance at the Ecstatic Music Festival. It truly was a magical experience with the enthusiastic audience showing us love for the premieres of my composition Changing Same, Imani's Placeless, and our joint piece Awe & Humility. Luckily it was recorded and will soon be available to listen on WQXR's Q2, but for now you can check out Facebook for some of the great official photos taken by David Andrako (you don't have to be on FB to view). Also be sure to check out David's website where you can see some of his other amazing photos including from previous Ecstatic Music Festival concerts).

Thanks to all of the musicians, the Festival, curator Judd Greenstein, Merkin Concert Hall, Kaufman Center, all those in attendance, and of course to Imani Uzuri for the wonderful experience.

This post is the sixth in a series profiling some of the inspirations and thoughts behind the six movements of my composition Changing Same premiering March 16th, 2013 at the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York City. Previous posts in the series featured:

an overview on Changing Same

the first movement "19"

the second movement "Behold the Only Thing Greater than Yourself"

the third movement "Miserere"

the fourth movement "The Most Beautiful Magic"

the fifth movement "Alpha Man"

6.“Unlimited”“…we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.” 1

In January 2009 I stood freezing on the National Mall in Washington D.C. with two million others witnessing Barack Obama become President of the United States. Standing there with faces black, brown, and beige there was a palpable sense of excitement and anticipation that the truly unlimited opportunity the original “promise of America” represented, seemed finally reachable to not only someone like me, but seemly anyone and everyone with ability, a dream, temerity, perseverance, and luck. That day felt like a beginning, where the phrase “one nation” took on renewed resonance and meaning. And while the realities of governance since then have tempered the fires of hope, they have not extinguished them. No matter her ultimate direction America is forever changed, not only for the now but for the “unborn millions to come” in the long now.

Producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff with their “Philly Sound”—an often energetic and richly orchestrated dance music—are sometimes credited with laying the foundations for disco in the 1970s. In my ancient early days growing up, before I had any idea of who Gamble and Huff were or exactly what disco was, the songs they produced—such as “Me and Mrs. Jones,” “Back Stabbers,” “Now that We Found Love,” “Love Train,” “For the Love of Money,” “When Will I See You Again,” and “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)” (also known as the Soul Train theme song)—formed an indelible imprint on an impressionable little kid. Often I was less interested about what the singers actually sang about (was too young to understand much anyway). Rather, I enjoyed the mood, atmosphere, and energy those songs created; the sophisticated way they moved you or made you want to move, “it like put a bow tie on the funk. It made it elegant." 2

Echoes from “The Love I Lost” by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes featuring the incredible lead singing of Teddy Pendergrass and “Love’s Theme” by Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra (an artist influenced by Gamble and Huff) can be heard throughout “Unlimited.”

(note: the YouTube video of the 1994 documentary Rock & Roll is from the BBC version, and NOT the version that aired on PBS and that I recorded on my VCR back then; among some slight, but noticeable differences between the two versions are the PBS version was narrated by Liev Schreiber and also featured some different musical acts shown. The opening part on the above video clip features the song "The Love I Lost" and is in both versions)

This post is the fifth in a series profiling some of the inspirations and thoughts behind the six movements of my composition Changing Same premiering March 16th, 2013 at the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York City. Previous posts in the series featured:

an overview on Changing Same

the first movement "19"

the second movement "Behold the Only Thing Greater than Yourself"

the third movement "Miserere"

the fourth movement "The Most Beautiful Magic"

5.“Alpha Man”"You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest. "1

I did not grow up in a ghetto, but that sentiment most definitely fit me in my younger years. Glasses, check; Comic books, check; computers, check. And while I was an outstanding athlete growing up, and had that to fall back on in the neighborhood social hierarchy, one of my younger pursuits was drawing my own comic books. One character I created was called Alpha Man: a lowly Earth physician who through a freakish accident (naturally) was imbued with the ‘cosmic force.’ Initially he was (ambivalently) on a team of evil, but after a nasty defeat he was banished to the far reaches of the galaxy, where he became a solitary exile wandering the universe; in the process he became a wise and sage protector. While one can detect hints of the Silver Surfer, the character of Alpha Man was more influenced by Carl Sagan. In his groundbreaking television series, Cosmos, which I watched as it premiered on PBS, a number of episodes imagined an interstellar space-ship, piloted by a single life form, traveling the mysteries of the universe collecting information for an ‘Encyclopædia Galactica’. This image continues to hold a particular fascination for me. Profane, beautiful, ebullient, and melancholy, it speaks of the eternal; not only of the infinity of the universe itself, but also the infinite capacity and imagination of the mind to explore the unknown (and the unknowable).

About ninth grade Gustav Holst’s The Planets was the first cassette tape I remember asking my mom to buy me. The entire piece, which sounded little like anything I had ever heard to that point (well maybe John Williams’s Star Wars), had a deep impact on my beginning musical aspirations. The movements “Venus” and “Saturn” were not my favorites back then (“Mars” and “Jupiter” were) but since then have offered inspiration that found its way into “Alpha Man.” “Saturn” from Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, an album that was a tutor in my early musical schooling, was another appropriate addition to the development of “Alpha Man.”

This post is the fourth in a series profiling some of the inspirations and thoughts behind the six movements of my composition Changing Same premiering March 16th, 2013 at the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York City. Previous posts in the series featured:

an overview on Changing Same

the first movement "19"

the second movement "Behold the Only Thing Greater than Yourself"

the third movement "Miserere"

4.“The Most Beautiful Magic”

I don't remember the first time I heard something from Prince and the Revolution's Purple Rain, but I definitely remember friends coming back to school raving about the tour in 1984 and it's sold-out two-week legendary run at my local arena (regretfully I didn't go and it would be another 10 years or so before I saw Prince live for the first time). Back in the day, before he started being more accessible to interviews and public appearances Prince was this decidedly enigmatic yet strangely compelling figure in my consciousness. Shortly after the album came out I was sitting in my cousin's room one day and listening to the LP (remember the time when one would actually stop the world spinning to sit down and spend time listening); now I'm sure it wasn't the first time I heard songs from the album, since almost everything was on rotation on the radio, but it was the most memorable: reading the LP liner notes, debating who was better, Michael Jackson or Prince, and constantly spinning the record backwards when it got to the end of "Purple Rain" and "Darling Nikki" trying to decode the messages from the ether. It would be another few years before I actually saw the movie, adding another layer of mystery behind Prince and the album.

Looking back, this seminal 1984 album was a major influence on my personal musical development. As a young teenager listening to the then just released Purple Rain was revelatory. With its virtuosic and vertiginous mixture of rock, funk, R&B, pop, and electronica, Prince’s “Minneapolis sound” was a perspicacious vision of music as an integrated fusion of styles and genres that wholly resonated with my own nascent mixed music aesthetics, philosophies, and aspirations. “Purple Rain,” “Beautiful Ones,” and “Computer Blue,” three songs from Purple Rain, are the deep structures that help build “The Most Beautiful Magic,” with the emotional inspiration coming from Richard and Mildred Loving. The Lovings were the couple at the center of the landmark June 12, 1967 Supreme Court decision, Loving v. Virginia, effectively ending America’s miscegenation laws banning interracial marriages. “The Most Beautiful Magic” title is a quote from the movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince where one character describes the singular beauty that comes from a basic and simple (magical) act. This seemed appropriate to describe the affirmative power and courage of the Lovings to marry despite unjust laws legally denying them the opportunity to do so. As Mildred Loving explained in a speech celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision, their act of defiance “wasn't to make a political statement or start a fight. We were in love, and we wanted to be married.”1

This post is the third in a series profiling some of the inspirations and thoughts behind the movements of my composition Changing Samepremiering March 16th, 2013 at the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York City. The other parts of the series included:

an overview on Changing Same

the first movement "19"

the second movement "Behold the Only Thing Greater than Yourself"

I remember hearing and reading the buzz about mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's much-heralded 2003 Nonesuch recording of J.S. Bach's cantata Ich habe genug BWV 82 long before I was actually able to hear it (knowledge of the powerful Peter Sellars staging of the two Bach cantatas featured on the album came later still; and I must say I was not disappointed when my ears finally were able to hear Lieberson's exquisite voice on the recording). I first heard the song "Someday We'll All Be Free" when Aretha Franklin's version was featured in the 1992 film Malcolm X(an aside: if Daniel Day-Lewis was rightly lauded by the Oscars for his impressive channeling of the "Great Emancipator" in Lincoln, then Denzel Washington's equally compelling Malcolm, should have been also justly swaged by the Academy). It wasn't until almost a decade after seeing Spike Lee's film that I found my way to Donny Hathaway's original 1973 version on his last studio album, Extensions of a Man. Both the Lieberson version of Ich habe genug and the Hathaway version of "Someday We'll All Be Free" are the musical inspirations behind my "Miserere."

Traditionally Miserere is a musical setting of the 51st Psalm (Miserere mei, Deus, secundum misericordiam tuam ("O God, have mercy upon me, according to thine heartfelt mercifulness") and has been set by composers such as Gregorio Allegri, Josquin des Pres, Henryk Gorecki, and Arvo Pärt. My “Miserere” however does not seek to reflect any kind of religious faith of salvation in the hereafter; rather it is a lamentation of more terrestrial pleadings. Taking inspiration from the Bach, whose title translates to “I have enough,” the original lyrics of “Miserere” begin with "I have had enough" and continue expressing weary frustration and doubt in the ability to come to terms with one’s many struggles and problems. The lyrics of “Miserere” convey a muted sense of earthly hope in the face of a seemingly increased hopelessness. And perhaps it is that hope in the face of hopelessness and doubt, one will "emerge from all the suffering that still binds [us] to the world."1

This post is the second in a series profiling some of the inspirations and thoughts behind the movements of my composition Changing Same premiering March 16th, 2013 at the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York City.

2. “Behold the Only Thing Greater than Yourself”

I remember sitting down as a family to watch the mini-series Roots and ours were one of many familiesthat did the same. Roots became a talked about topic in my neighborhood and in the backyard football and baseball field. Not that I was particularly interested in slavery but even the young elementary school kid I was recognized that Roots was an amazing achievement at that time: an entire high-profile TV series based on black characters that not only black people were interested in watching. It taught a very early lesson to me that stories involving black people and lives were also worth watching and telling.

The title for the second movement of Changing Same comes from the scene in Roots when the family patriarch lifts his newborn child to the star-filled night sky and proclaims “Behold, the only thing greater than yourself.” Those words are a powerfully plangent call valuing one’s intrinsic self-worth and potential in spite of societal resistance often working in opposition to maintaining a positive self-evaluation. Throughout America’s history, blacks confronted this resistance, as James Baldwin wrote, by “groaning and moaning, watching, calculating, clowning, surviving, and outwitting” with “some tremendous strength…nevertheless being forged, which is part of [black] legacy today.”1 And today it is often single mothers left to hold on to that legacy, presenting their children before the world with the gift of love, resiliency, resolve, and strength.

This movement is dedicated to my mom, who struggled as a single parent to raise me and my siblings with that gift of love and strength, resolve, and resiliency so that we are able to not only survive but live and thrive; to have skills and fortitude to take advantage of any opportunity, adding a small contribution to that legacy.

photo Angela Davis at St. Cloud University From public domain, PhotoJournal.com

This post is a first in a series profiling some of the inspirations and thoughts behind the six movements of my composition Changing Same premiering March 16th, 2013 at the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York City.

1. “19”“[W]e must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”1

Being a very young kid growing up in the 1970s I was still forming my thoughts about life. But some images from the media stuck out and left an indelible impression on me about the range and diversity in the black world: movies such as Car Wash and The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings and other blaxploitation films (although I didn't know the term then), TV shows such as Soul Train, Good Times, Sanford and Sons, Fat Albert and The Jeffersons, Dr. J, Mohammed Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, the great multi-ethnic Big Red Machine, the Parliament Funkadelic LPs of my parents, and the black cultural movement featuring powerful political figures such as Shirley Chisholm, Harold Washington, and Angela Davis. Even though I was too young to understand exactly who or what she was or about, the image of a full Afro'd Angela Davis speaking was quite iconic to my young mind.

“19” is partly inspired by a number of seemly disparate musical sources: Arnold Schoenberg's Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke opus 19 from 1911 (one of the first Schoenberg pieces I studied and liked, specifically the Maurizio Pollini DG recording--nineteen is also the age when I began studying music as an undergraduate, after two years working toward a biochem major), Curtis Mayfield’s “Little Child Runnin’ Wild” from his seminal score to the 1972 film Superfly, and a hint of the go-go music of Chuck Brown. The emotional timbre of “19” however, is inspired by the activist Angela Davis and her status in the black culture of my youth. Writer James Baldwin's November 19, 1970 “An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis” is stirring in its description of Davis as a soldier in the on-going struggle for racial and social equality and a martyr in the “enormous revolution in black consciousness…[that] means the beginning or the end of America.”2 The letter, while condemning the false arrest of Angela Davis that summer, goes on to describe the contemporary state of racial dynamics in the United States in biting and incisive commentary.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2013"R&B is about emotion, issues purely out of emotion. New Black Music is also about emotion, but from a different place, and finally, towards a different end. What these musicians feel is a more complete existence. That is, the digging of everything."-LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), “The Changing Same” (1966)

Changing Same, my composition premiering on the Ecstatic Music Festival on March 16, 2013, is a philosophical and musical departure for me: it is a conscious acknowledgement of my early heritage in black popular music and culture. Previously my work was little interested in specifically or overtly reflecting this background in my musical language; my philosophy was (and still is) representative of a ‘post-black’ artistic freedom to explore any creative interest, unburdened with the obligation of only representing or being influenced by ‘the race.’ I am a composer, not just a ‘black’ composer. My journey ‘home’ began a few years ago when I was taken aback by something writer John Murph stated in an interview: “…there’s the whole idea of what is deemed more artistically valid… [with] artists incorporating contemporary pop music. I notice a certain disdain when some black…artists channel R&B, funk, and hip-hop, while their white contemporaries get kudos for giving makeovers to the likes of Radiohead, Nick Drake, and Bjork.”1

While my influences growing up (and now) are quite catholic—an inter-cultural fluency wherein James Brown and Yes, Eddie Van Halen and John Coltrane, go-go music and minimalism provide equal inspiration—I wondered if John Murph’s statement was really true and if so, why was it true? Regardless of the validity of the charge, this question provoked a challenge in me. Fueling a desire, like Duke Ellington in the 1940s with Black, Brown, and Beige or Wadada Leo Smith recently with Ten Freedom Summers, to create music that speaks to the “dichotomies of high and low, inside and outside, tradition and innovation”2 within black culture and explores the richness and complexity of being black in 21st century America; but also music that resonates a more universal artistic expression filtered through the changing sameness of an intimately autobiographical perspective.

So-called indie classical/alt-classical is a reflection of alternative rock and other vernacular music as a palimpsest for the creation of new contemporary music of an expansive and open definition and vision. I wanted to express similar aesthetic ideas however using black vernacular music as the main source, testing John Murph’s assertion. From these musings the gestation of Changing Same began. Musically almost every movement is influenced by a fragment, motive, or chord progression from various black popular music influences I grew up with. I, however, wanted to recognize other sources of inspiration as well—a “digging of everything”—so almost all the movements are connected to various influential classical music and/or personal and cultural memories during my lifetime. This miscegenation is done not in a post-modern sense of ironic collage, but rather as a genuine search to create an organic fusion of artistic and cultural influences, to create a new personal artistic statement that is more than the sum of its parts. This is mixed music.

Check back because in later posts I will be discussing the inspirations behind each movement for Changing Same and for the music nerds out there with a few movements I'll provide some detailed analysis. Hope you to see you in March.

Numinous will perform at the Ecstatic Music Festival in NYC. In its third year, this two month festival is one of the premier forums for new music in New York, featuring artists who organically blend different genres and different influences; the Festival "bring[s] artists together for unexpected and often surprising collaborations exploring the fertile terrain between classical and popular music." Numinous is honored to not only be apart of the Festival with all of the other dynamic and outstanding artists, but also with the opportunity to collaborate with an incredible singer and musician, Imani Uzuri.

At Ecstatic we will premiere my new composition,Changing Same, which will premiere on the first half of the Festival performance (and will be recorded soon after). This piece is "bringing it all back home" so to speak: a six­-movement composition where some of the early (pre-rock) popular musical influences I had growing up--­­Prince, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, Chuck Brown, Barry White, and Gamble and Huff­­--directly and subtly inform my contemporary classical musical language to create a compelling, intimate, and affirming musical "memory book." The second half of the concert will feature a composition by Imani, as well as a collaborative composition between myself and Imani. It's going to something special so if you're in NYC in March, get your tickets now!

Check back, in the coming weeks as I publish some details and inspirations behind each movement of Changing Same as well as the other music on the Festival.

Tickets available for our concert here or get a Festival pass or build your own ticket package and check out some of the other great concerts on Ecstatic (beyond our concert I'll be at a number of the other Ecstatic Music Festival gigs too so maybe I'll see you there as well)!